I related this story to a doctor friend of mine and this is what he had to say:
"The larger group to which I belong has an Infectious Disease guy who tracks some of this stuff. He gave our corporate administration a heads-up that something wasn't quite right around December 2019 (if I can correctly remember the story as I was told). So the organization was making at least tentative plans for what to do if the whole thing blew up on us. It was of limited benefit but at least some - and he was effectively ahead of the CDC on this.
Obiden had effectively depleted all the federal reserves of equipment and gear for handling this kind of situation never replenishing it from the virus that attacked us a decade ago, and Trump's administration had not yet recognized the need to correct for the deficit so we were still ill-equipped to handles something as big as Covid.
And then the Chinese were lying to us and not steering us in the right direction. It doesn't help that they had (under the Bush administration IIRC) thrown out the wisdom of decades and centuries about what to do in a pandemic.
You had our supposedly best and brightest spouting the nonsense that China had the right approach and was giving us the straight story about the origin of the Covid-19 virus. It was clearly poppycock since the Chinese couldn't come up with a consistent story or one that fit anywhere close to reality.
I think it was best understood as a bioweapon which the Chinese inadvertently released into their population and purposefully released to the rest of the world. It may not have even been designed to be a bioweapon but when they deliberately sent their people to the USA and other destinations they made it a bioweapon nevertheless.
It is not clear to me that South Korea did it all that much better. It's a very different society and you can't do the same here as you can there. IIRC, the South Koreans were doing a bunch of contact tracing which was utterly useless around here as we probably had community spread in this area as early as November or December of 2019. Once you have community spread, contact tracing is pretty much laughable but that didn't stop state and local governments from spending huge amounts of money to do that. Interestingly, not a one of my many patients who had Covid-19 and had that fact reported were ever contacted for contact tracing.
So you see, there really wasn't anything Trump or anyone else could have much done. The mistakes made early on by the fed when the virus first came to the USA, the delays, confusion, and lack of contact tracing pretty much guaranteed the eventual spread of the bug among all the population by not nipping it in the bud and containing it when they could have, followed by not stopping travel from Europe as well amid all the angst started over stopping it coming in directly from China, which many deemed xenophobic."